Tiananmen killings won't be forgotten despite China's efforts

June 4, 2014|By Robert L. Moore, Guest columnist

As of today, China's government has still failed to acknowledge its responsibility for the Tiananmen massacre of 1989. The demonstrators who were gunned down by the People's Liberation Army that summer had originally assembled in Tiananmen Square to pay respects to the recently deceased Hu Yaobang, a Communist Party reformer who favored a more liberal and responsive government. The massacre, commonly known in China as "June Four," will have its 25th anniversary today.

An excellent introduction to the story of the massacre is Louisa Lim's new book, "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited." Lim cites the Chinese government's efforts to erase June Four from the public memory, including, for example, the blocking on social media of such phrases as "Tiananmen," "massacre," "June Four," "6 4" and a host of others considered provocative.

Lim's account includes the story of Chen Guang, one of the soldiers who participated in the event. He did not do any killing, mainly because an officer recognized his distress at the prospect of shooting people and told him to set aside his weapon and concentrate on photographing the event.

Today Chen Guang is an artist who dedicates his work to the memory of the massacre. Probably because he is not well known, the government ignored him for many years as he pursued his projects, but this month, as the 25th anniversary approached, the authorities finally detained him.

Lim admits that his country's leaders have succeeded in confusing younger Chinese about the nature of the massacre. But I doubt that they will continue to be successful in the long run, in light of the things I've heard in a number of conversations I've had with knowledgeable citizens during my frequent visits to China over the past 20 years.

One whom I remember particularly well was a woman in her 20s when I spoke to her some 15 years ago; she talked with bitterness about the government's killing of her fellow Beijingers. When I asked her how many really remembered an event that had taken place over a decade before, she expressed her seething rage with a kind of hissing, half-whispered reply, "Everybody remembers."

There are some Chinese who know about the massacre but who give the government a pass in the name of stability. But those who defend the government have declined in numbers in recent years as the Communist Party has descended ever deeper into the mire of crass corruption.

China's leaders are in the habit of counterattacking foreigners who criticize them by pointing to comparable failings in the countries of their critics. But they have no leg to stand on where the Tiananmen massacre is concerned. No modern Western democracy has unleashed an army to slaughter hundreds of its own citizens the way China's Communist Party leaders did in 1989.

And more to the point, in those rare cases where soldiers in a democracy do fire on citizens, as at Kent State in 1970, governments don't struggle to erase the killings from the public memory. Anyone can look up the Kent State story in both official and unofficial historical records. Not so Tiananmen.

This is the Chinese government's problem. It has to work constantly and feverishly, monitoring social media, censoring news reports, jailing those who insist on publicizing the tragedy and muzzling the mothers of the slain students. As Louisa Lim points out, occasionally a government agent sent to silence a protester will walk off the job in disgust when he finds out what he is being asked to do.

The fact that the Chinese government works so hard to keep the Tiananmen killings out of the national conversation shows just how concerned it is about its own culpability. And for me, this is a sign of hope. Perhaps someday the real heroes of Tiananmen will receive the respect they deserve — as patriotic Chinese citizens.

Perhaps someday even the late reformer, Hu Yaobang himself, will be honored for his vision and his compassion.

Robert L. Moore is a professor of anthropology at Rollins College and director of the Holt School's International Affairs program.